“If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.” -- SCOTUS

We’ve had two major rounds of “campaign finance reform” violating the first amendment in the past forty years. Each one has turned out to INCREASE the very bribery and corruption they were supposed to end, becoming the very means of filtering money to candidates or officials, and promoting causes out of proportion with their real support.

This is because:

The Law of Unintended Consequences. Imposing simplistic “order”, by force, on a complex system always produces unexpected results, usually the opposite of what you intended.

Each one increased the power of government, making bribery of government that much more profitable

As long as government has power that is profitable, the private sector will pay WHATEVER it takes to obtain it. If the “reforms” made bribery more difficult, then it simply raised the cost, which made accepting bribes more profitable to the GOVERNMENT, increasing the incentive for officials to be corrupt.

By “organizing” the thing in question, through imposing a government bureaucracy on it, the “reforms” just create an orderly, static way of bribing government officials and calling it “legal”.

Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is the definition of…stupidity.

It is stupid to expect future, censorship-oriented “Campaign finance reform” to do anything but increase corruption and abuse, the way all previous ones did…even if it targets the speech of people who are associated with corporations.

So when politicos like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum call for people fighting against government secrecy to be falsely classified as “enemy combatants”, “a terrorist organization”, or even to be assassinated or publicly executed, it’s pretty clear who the real enemy of America is.

What Wikileaks, and its founder Julian Assange, have vowed to do…and done, far more than most of us ever expected…is to bring the openness to American politics that politicians like Obama, McCain, and Bush promised but ended up opposing in almost all things.

If the government keeps an embarrassing secret from its own voters, this changes how they vote. That is the same violation of an election as if there were armed stormtroopers in your polling booth, changing your vote.

What is the excuse these attackers of the Constitution use as their excuse? That people who have lied to and kept secrets from the American voter might be endangered.

The moment a corporation stands up, like Frankenstein’s Monster, and starts talking without human intervention, I’ll agree that they might be censored.

But the fact is that a “corporation” is comprised of individuals, and THEY have their freedom of speech protected…even while they work for or own that corporation.

Censorship advocates, like judicial nominee Elena Kagan, and Liberal Republican John McCain, want to silence people, on the flimsy premise that they happen to be members of a corporation. They are violating the first amendment, because individuals are writing the copy that is being banned from publication.

You might as well censor them for belonging to a political party. We could just say “the constitution protects individuals, not parties”.

For that matter, publishing houses, newspapers, and blog hosting sites are corporations…everything they publish could be censored the same way.

You could censor the corporation if it tried to talk like some monstrous creation, but not the employees and management of the company who are actually buying political ads or other speech.